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Happy Yule! Or Christmas or Hanukkah or Saturnalia or Hanukkah or HumanLight or Kwanzaa or Festivus or whatever you might to celebrate around this time.

Yule is from the old-time Germanic name for celebrations at this time of year, a name that Scandinavians still use. I don’t have a Yule log to burn, but with the help of wiktionary.org, I’ve composed some proto-Germanic, spoken some 2000 – 2500 years ago in what is now northern Germany and southern Scandinavia:

Good Yule! Good sun-standing (solstice). Happiness to all people — to all men and women.

Solstice: the word is a borrowing from Old French solstice, in turn from Latin solstitium, “sun-standing”

Why celebrate at this time of year? Because in the northern hemisphere, the Sun seems like it is returning from having gone southward. Why lights? Because light is what the northern hemisphere is short of. Why evergreen trees? Because they seem like they are still alive. The traditional song “O Tannenbaum” / “O Christmas Tree” celebrates how that tree does not seem to die, as many other trees seem to.

I come to my final major category of solutions, the hypothesis that interstellar-capable extraterrestrial civilizations are unwilling to make contact with us, or else that they are trying to hide from us and other civilizations. Not surprisingly, this category contains some “fun” hypotheses. Here are some:

There is an additional set of issues that I wish to discuss before I turn to other Fermi-paradox solutions.

Natural Disasters

Self-Destruction

So after looking at all these factors, I conclude that there are numerous possible bottlenecks that can prevent the emergence of a long-lived technological civilization, and numerous possible calamities that have been nicknamed “The Great Filter”. So rarity is very hard to rule out.